[chuck-users] priorities for next release

[Kassen]

On 8/22/07, chris beck <render787 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I would disagree with that reasoning. Sure it's produced by academics, but
> this is the USERS list. And it is fundamentally a practical tool, not an
> academic exercise as you suggest. The fact that we are discussing it on this
> list means that usability is a serious concern.
>
> Although I might not disagree with the conclusion, the language itself
> certainly can and should be improved. I would say that standardizing the
> Ugen / Instrument interfaces should be high on this list.


This is getting interesting. As I see it ChucK is quite interesting as a
language that comes from accedemic research in that the main area of
research is a way of using it and not so much the language itself, at least
that's how I read some of the accedemic papers linked to ChucK. The fact
that there is a actives users list is a noteworthy outcome of the research
already.

Normally a very important feature for a language is "Turing completeness"
meaning that that language should be able to calculate anything that can be
calculated (given enough time and memory/disc). Perhaps we need a new sort
of completeness to test ChucK against since what we are after is realy the
ability to musically express anything we might like to musically express.

>From that perspective I think language features like lists can be every bit
as important as Ugen standardisation/improvement/additions which in turn can
be as important as conveniences like include-statements or recompiling only
a section of a program.

The main matter might realy be *preceived* "musical-completeness" by it's
users. Guitarists clearly hold that being unable to play chords larger
then 6 notes is no real issue while pianists tend not to be concerned with
pitch-bend. Perhaps what we should be after is reaching a similar stage
where the limitations and posibilities of ChucK form a instrument that gets
preceived as being expressive and coherent in a way similar to other
instruments.

At that point accedemic success and practicallity would become nearly
identical.

Kas.


p.s. none of this was intended to talk explicidly about just livecoding or
even realtime playing, I just thought I'd mention that before people feel
excluded.
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